1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to automatic segmentation and clustering of ordered information.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional audio summarization techniques segment audio and then select a representative selection from each segment. A subset of these selections is used as a summary of the audio. However, these conventional systems require a great deal of time to produce a summary since the entire work must be reviewed to create candidate segments. Additional review is required to select representative segments selections for the summary. Finally, even when a representative segment is selected, the representative segment may be too lengthy to provide an appropriate summary.
In video summary generation, some conventional video summary generators have attempted to use scene transition graphs to perform ad-hoc segmentation. The ad-hoc segmentation is then followed by a hierarchical clustering process to create a summary. Other conventional video summary generators have used closed captions, acoustic silence and pitch to determine the segment boundaries and to identify candidate segments for use in generating summaries. These conventional systems depend on determining the presence of closed captions, acoustic silence and pitch within the work and do not work well when these features are difficult to detect or missing from the work. Moreover, these conventional systems merely select a representative segment and therefore are not able to generate summaries of overly long candidate segments.